“A rose issues from thorns.”—Arabic Proverb.
The desert looked like an immense mosque with vast purple dome inlaid with silvery stars, spread with a carpet of many colours—grey, amethyst, saffron, fawn—stretching to Eternity for the feet of worshippers to tread. It held the peace of great spaces and the prayer of the everlasting, and changed, in the twinkling of the stars, to the likeness of a fairy meadow, in which flowers of every shape nodded and curtsied and bowed to each other, as far as eye could see; flowers formed by the light breeze which twisted and turned the sand into little spirals, until the desert seemed covered with dancing, silvery poppies across which love came as silently, as unexpectedly as it comes in country lanes or the city’s crowded thoroughfares.
Helen Raynor looked over her shoulder towards the camp, pitched under the isolated palms which formed the so-called oasis, and smiled at the sound of her “boy’s” voice raised in what he termed a love song, but which had all the monotonous ring of a long-drawn-out litany of personal woes.
She sat on a hummock of sand, dazzlingly fair in the starlight, with a smile of content on her broad, humorous mouth, and the expectancy of youth in her great, blue eyes, whilst the golden sand trickled between her fingers as she counted the seconds of the hour in which love and adventure were to come to her.
She thought lazily of the hot-weather months just passed, spent quite happily in the big, old palace in Ismailiah bought by her grandfather who, in his wanderings[71] in the desert, had acquired some of the attributes of the salamander and an unconscious thoughtlessness towards the well-being of his neighbour.
Unattracted by the little she knew of the world, she had been intensely grateful at the unconventional turn life had taken three years ago, inaugurating a new mode of existence with vista of unknown lands and good promise of great adventure. She had proved herself of the greatest assistance to her irascible grandfather. There was no doubt about it, that, although he seldom bit, he certainly barked furiously, or rather, yapped without ceasing, driving others almost frantic through the methodical working of a mind which teased the most infinitesimal detail to shreds, wore him to fiddle-strings, led him from success to success and caused his secretaries one after the other to fold their tents and to steal away to less nerve-wracking fields of labour.
Since leaving school, Helen had firmly established herself as his secretary and had accompanied him wherever he had been sent by the Irrigation Department. She had made herself responsible for his creature comforts, which almost amounted to nil, and the good conduct of the staff which learned to adore her, with the exception of Pierre Lefort.
Half French, half native, he was of the worst type of Oriental. Eaten up with the vanity of the superficially educated, but with a genuine, great knowledge of the Arabian horse and the obstreperous camel, the young man had managed to make himself seemingly indispensable to Sir Richard on his expeditions. Helen became accustomed to great distances and solitude, and her eyes gained the steadfast look of those who look upon the sky as the roof of their dwelling, whilst her unfailing sense of humour invariably brought her safely through the most trying ordeals.
Diplomatically feeling her way through the barbed wire entanglement of her grandfather’s testiness, she[72] gained a great influence over the brilliant man and, knowing how he chafed against the authoritative methods and manner of the government official, had dropped the suggestion in his all-willing ear of taking a busman’s holiday—a holiday expedition with the object of trying to find out the whereabouts of the legendary water in the great Red Desert, the discovery of which had become almost an obsession with him, since the day he had read the vellum inscribed by the Holy Palladius.
They had spent the hot-weather months in getting ready for the expedition, helped enthusiastically by every member of the staff excepting Pierre Lefort who, loving the dregs of the European society he frequented in the cities and the corners of the Bazaar to which he rightly belonged, had made use of every means in his power to frustrate their endeavours.
He had sworn to an epidemic amongst the camels and dromedaries in Arabia proper, which was causing them to die by hundreds; to an absolute dearth of camel drivers, owing to the terror the men had of the animals’ disease; to the truth of the terrible tales that had lately come to hand of the activities of a notorious robber gang, led by a woman, which swooped down from nowhere upon unwary travellers; that, in consequence of this band of brigands, neither guide nor servant could be procured for love or money on the other side, and that last, but not least, no man had ever been known to penetrate, even a little way, into the empty desert and to return alive.
Each of his objections had been met; the expedition, down to the smallest detail, carefully mapped out; the date for the start fixed and the camp pitched some fifty miles out of Ismailiah. Pierre Lefort would doubtlessly, if sullenly, have accompanied the party for the sake of the monetary gain, if he had not fallen a victim to the wiles of a dancer in the Bazaar.
Had ensued a heated scene between him and Sir Richard which had ended by the latter taking him by the collar of[73] the coat and impelling him, none too gently, back upon the road towards Ismailiah.
Since then a week had passed, which Sir Richard had spent in racing, as fast as swiftest camel could take him, into Ismailiah, there to interview men with a knowledge of camels and horses, and racing back to tell his granddaughter of the blanks he had drawn.
There remained another fortnight in which to find someone endowed with camel and horse sense, and Helen had just fled the camp after a trying scene with her distracted and pessimistic relative.
“Grandads,” she had said, after the recital of the latest failure, “I have an idea, although it’s only a faint-hope kind of idea.”
“Well!” had snapped Grandads, who was ready to take his ships of the desert into almost any kind of a port to protect himself from the storm of failure which threatened to burst.
“I think you are making a great mountain out of your mole-hill.”
“Meaning?”
“Lefort. There are others who understand as much about horses as he does. I do—for one—almost—and so does Abdul, who did all the spadework under him. Let me be vet, with Abdul for head groom and——”
“Wh-a-a-t?” Sir Richard had sprung from his canvas chair with a bound which would have done credit to a jerboa, or kangaroo rat. “You! In charge of the horses—you—and what do you know of camels, may I ask?”
“As much, dearest, as anybody, which amounts to nothing. If it’s sick, it usually makes up its obstinate mind to die, so there’s no use worrying about that; if you want to get an extra hour of work out of it, you give it a most noisome lump of barley-meal and water, and add a cupful of whisky if you want to make it waltz; if you want it to go to the right, touch it on the left, and vice versa, and if it’s out on a non-stop run, hang your coat[74] over its head to pull it up. It will go for six days in the summer and, I believe, ten in the winter without a drink, and is warranted to eat everything it comes across; in fact, I saw Mahli making breakfast off your oldest pair of night slippers this very morning.”
All that she had said was true. She was a magnificent horsewoman, and there was mighty little she did not know about horses; in fact, up to her fifteenth birthday she had unequally divided her time between her lessons and her horses, to the decided detriment of the former; then, upon the death of her mother, had entreated to be allowed to accompany her grandfather to Egypt. He, unpractical in everything that did not concern the finding of water in desert places, had consented, and, acting upon some motherly soul’s advice, offered directly they had arrived in Cairo, had pushed her promptly under the sheltering wings of the Misses Cruikshanks.
But she might as well have pleaded with the Great Pyramid this night of stars as she had sat, just outside the tent, with her beautiful head against the canvas whilst her distracted kinsman had figuratively rent his raiment in wrath.
“You!” he had cried. “What authority would you have over the pack of rapscallions who look after the shameless beasts called camels, any one of which, in the eyes of the average Mohammedan, is of a hundred times more value than a woman? I know all about woman’s rights in England, but let me tell you that that means nothing, absolutely less than nothing out here, where she is not even allowed to possess a soul of her own, much less a vote. No! if I can’t find a man to fill the post, I will resign myself to having failed, throw up my position in the Irrigation Department, and take to bee-keeping in England.”
And Helen Raynor, who firmly believed that if a thing is to happen it happens, and that nothing can prevent it from happening, also vice versa, had ridden some miles[75] out into the silence, where she had hobbled her mare and sat down upon the hummock to think things over. She sat facing the direction in which Ismailiah lay, sat quite still, until the peacefulness of the desert seemed to enfold her and to wipe out the memory of the past weeks, which had gone far to disturb the tranquillity she so loved to bring into the daily life of the camp. She looked all round in utter content and lifted her face to the stars and listened to the great silence, unbroken now, even by the love song, then sat forward and stared in the direction of Ismailiah.
Great is the solitude of the desert, with no sign of life in it at all; haunting is its solitude when, in the far distance, a solitary figure moves slowly across the limitless sands.
It is the most perfect illustration of the little span of life granted each of us upon this earth.
Out of seeming nothing, remote, alone, the figure approaches, growing clearer and clearer to the watching eye; maybe for a space he stops and raises his head to the star-strewn sky, or maybe he passes on, heedless of God’s thoughts about him; even if he stays it will be but for a brief second before he continues his journey, growing dimmer and dimmer until he passes out of sight, alone, into apparent nothingness.
Helen Raynor sat watching a solitary figure as it came slowly towards her from a far distance, and pressed her hand upon her heart, troubled by the biblical picture, the silence, the unknown.
So might Abraham have looked in his youth, or Job before affliction fell upon him, or Boaz, or David, for the desert has not changed since their days, nor has the camel learned to hasten its pace or to alter the insolence of its gait. The night breeze died away suddenly and the flowers born of it faded, leaving a path, marked in grey and silver as though the tide had but just receded from it, for the passage of the camel’s feet, which were suddenly[76] urged to a swift trot by its rider, who rode bare-headed and wrapped in a burnous.
When about a mile off Ralph Trenchard raised his hand above his head in salutation to the figure he could see sitting on the hummock, and urged his camel quicker still, then pulled it to a halt and sat and stared at the girl, who looked like some silver statue under the light of the stars; then slipped to the ground instead of bringing the beast to its knees, hobbled it, dropped the white cloak, and followed the beckoning finger of Love, whom he could not see for the beauty of the girl, along the path which had been marked for him to tread even before the days of Abraham.
And Helen Raynor rose and walked towards him, holding out her hand, so that they neared each other and met yet again, as those who truly love do meet down the ages, and will meet, until in perfect understanding they become one perfect spirit which will not be divided even by the short-lived dream of death.
“I seem to know you so well,” said Ralph Trenchard quietly.
“And I you. I have seen you—I recognize the scar across your temple.” Helen Raynor pressed her hand against her forehead in an effort to capture the elusive memory which had suddenly flitted through her mind. “I cannot remember. I——”
“My name is Ralph Trenchard, and my business in Egypt one of pleasure. I was riding out into the desert to be alone at sunrise.”
She shook her head and looked about her and up to the stars and into the eyes of the man who had come to her out of the night, and yet not as a stranger; and she looked frankly at the lean, handsome face with the powerful jaw and humorous mouth, and smiled into the quiet grey eyes, and made a movement with her hand towards the oasis.
“I cannot remember where I have seen you, but will you not come to our camp and have some coffee? I would[77] not keep you from your ride, but my grandfather will, I am sure, be delighted to meet you. I am——”
“Of course!” broke in Ralph Trenchard, as he stooped to remove the hobble from the mare, who danced sideways at the smell of camel which permeated the new-comer. “You must be Miss Raynor. Everybody is talking about the danger of the expedition you are starting out on; they don’t seem to see the other side, the privilege of searching for something which has been lost for centuries, the joy of adventuring into a new country.”
They walked across to the camel, which stretched its neck and made a vicious snap at the mare, who immediately retaliated by lashing out at the contemptuous face.
“Quiet, you brute!” said Ralph Trenchard, as he removed the hobble, whereupon the said brute turned its hideous head and winked at him in hearty friendliness. “There is one thing I really do pride myself upon, Miss Raynor, though perhaps I ought not to, as it may only be the result of a certain brotherhood in sheer mule-headed obstinacy which I share with the quadruped.”
“And what is it?”
“The way I can manage camels. They seem absolutely to love me before my face, whatever they feel behind my back. I can do almost anything I like with them.”
Helen Raynor walked close up to him and laid her hand upon his sleeve.
“Tell me,” she said eagerly, “where are you going to after you leave Egypt?”
“Well, I have been trying to make up my mind. I’m just down from Oxford, and am having a look round the old places before settling down to manage the estate which came to me when the dear old governor died a few months ago. I was born out here, lived here until I was ten. My people were stationed out here all over the place. Mother is buried in Khartoum. I love the country, and speak the language like a native. I don’t mind much[78] where I go, but I do wish I could have one jolly good adventure when I get there.”
“Come,” said Helen, her beautiful teeth flashing in a delighted smile, “I’m more convinced than ever that my grandfather will be delighted to meet you.”